Morning Shots

“Which side are you on, boy…
Which side are you on…”

– Pete Seeger song, which got him blacklisted

I started my morning with a happy 3 year old insisting I go outside to hunt snails, and a 9 month old cooing in his high chair…my wife had coffee already made (!) and the dog, the birds and the fish had been fed…it was a good morning…but then (cue ominous music) came… the LA Times, with a front page story about the LAUSD – the Los Angeles Unified School District – an organization whose leaders act just like the CEOs of Enron. An entity that gets me standing in my PJ’s on a dining room chair, yelling “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

How is LAUSD like Enron?

1. Just as the leaders of Enron (and many publicly held companies) behave as if the company is their personal property, and theirs for their own gain, LAUSD administrators act as if they own the school system. They use our kids as pawns, as tools to keep money, jobs and power.

Make no mistake, public education has NOTHING to do with educating our kids.  It has EVERYTHING to do with the many school unions keeping the jobs of their members. For the unions, THAT is the acid test of any new reform program. NOT “Does it help the kids learn?” but “Does it keep our jobs, money and power?” They decide that first and then they “spin”… they dress up their positions in terms that sound like they give a damn about us and our kids future. Nonsense. If they cared, they’d all quit.

2. Just as the leaders of Enron kept lying to the public, claiming things were going great, even as THEY KNEW the company was going bankrupt, LAUSD

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Alameda County Superior Court Judge Robert Freedman struck down California’s new high school exit exam last week, saying the test is unfair to students who have been shortchanged by substandard public schools.

The attorney who filed the lawsuit, Arturo Gonzalez of the San Francisco law firm Morrison and Foerster, said, “There is overwhelming evidence that students throughout the state have not been taught the material on the test. And many students have been taught by teachers not credentialed in math and English.” His lawsuit pointed out that many students who failed the exit exam had attended overcrowded schools.

Had it not been for this court ruling, in June an estimated 8 percent of California high school seniors would have failed to earn a diploma because they had flunked all attempts at the exit exam. That 8 percent failure rate would be sad enough if this had been a real high school exit examination. In fact, the math portion is really an eighth-grade level test and thus better-suited as a middle-school exit exam.

Further, if the 30 percent of our kids who drop out of high school had been given that same exam, the vast majority of them likely would have failed also. We then might have seen as many as 38 percent of our high school seniors failing to achieve eighth-grade math proficiency.

With this kind of massive failure and so much at stake, what is holding us back from taking the next logical step and advocating making attractive alternatives available for these kids, who so much need a break?

In fact, the federal No Child Left Behind act mandates such alternatives. On March 23, disadvantaged minority families supported by the national Alliance for School Choice announced that they were taking action against Los Angeles Unified School District as well as the Compton

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Education Secretary Spellings recently announced the formation of a presidentially appointed panel that was formed to address math teaching.  According to the charter of this panel, one of its purposes is “to foster greater knowledge of and improved performance in mathematics among American students.”  The panel is charged with producing a report in two years, which must contain recommendations pertaining to how math instruction can be improved in the U.S.  In particular, the report must address the skills necessary for students to acquire competence in algebra and to prepare them for higher levels of mathematics.

The workings of the panel are not the type of thing that makes the front page of newspapers, the top story on TV news, or what is talked about in the local cafes.  To hear about this you need to drop in to the blogs (like Edspresso), or the various list serves on the internet devoted to math education.  There you will notice some discomfort among those who think that the way math is currently taught and the present crop of math texts being used in the U.S. is just fine.  They have openly expressed dismay at the inclusion on the panel of people who have been vocal critics of reform math, stating “This panel is filled with hacks, toadies and stooges.  Can you say ‘show trial’, children?   Have you ever seen the old reels of the Communist Party Congresses in Moscow?”  Allegations of pre-conceived conclusions then follow.

The rancor of the above comment is not unusual to those familiar with the never-ending debate between the mathematics and education communities in what has come to be known as the “math wars”.  The debate revolves around on state math standards, math texts and how math should be taught.  Reformers advocate the concept of “discovery

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